Finding ways to prostitute the Angry Birds in a number of licensed merchandise deals has been a big money maker for Rovio; it has become so much so that this accounted for up to 30% of the company’s 2011 income for the fiscal year.

Rovio’s consumer products business, which handles the merchandising and licensing, has over 200 licensing partners that are making a number of products. The Angry Birds appear on everything from T-Shirts to calendars and just about everything in between. The success of the licensing of the Angry Birds is quite amazing; and the licensing is an extension of its almost 650 million downloads across all of the platforms that the Angry Birds appear on.

Rovio’s success has inspired a number of other software publishers to look harder at merchandise licensing to help generate additional revenue for its most successful franchises. As we can see by Rovio’s success, it can be a game changer that adds considerably to the bottom line.

GSC Game World is seeking funding to continue, according to Oleg Yavorsky. In the meantime, development of STALKER 2 continues. According to Yavorsky via Facebook, GSC is seeking the funding to support STALKER 2 and they are hopeful that things turn out well eventually.

This is a quite a reversal from how bleak things looked for GSC back in December, when it looked then that the studio would be shut down and the development of STALKER 2 would end. At least for the moment, the STALKER team is happy to be working, but this does not solve the financial situation that GSC is in while they look for additional funding.

It is really a game of wait and see, according to sources we spoke with. In the meantime, the best news is that development continues.

Nvidia still has money in the bank and it did a lot of good things when it comes to transforming and adapting to the industry. Who could have expected that Google can be so late with Android 3.0 and all other future releases and that there will be so little applications.

Still, acquiring portal player back in 2007 earned Nvidia quite a good position in ARM CPU market, but this market still has to grow with the rest of the non-Apple tablet industry. This is something that is yet to happen, but it might work beyond the hype.

Nvidia has recently acquired Icera soft modem chipsets that can end up in many phones and tablets. Nvidia expects to have its first design wins with Icera LTE modems as soon as Q1 2012, which is what Jensen confirmed at the last company conference call. He said that these modems, particularly Espresso 450 HSPA+, have been tested, approved, and should be shipping with tablets early next year.

The real goal how to make money is integration of this technology in its mobile CPUs and we should see an ARM core with integrated Icera modem. The aim is to get into lower end Smartphone markets, which love all integrated CPU and modem solutions, seeing as how they can save manufacturers a few bucks per design.

This chip should be heavily integrated and it should arrive at some point in 2012. Jensen reminded us that smartphone market should grow to a billion phones in 2015 and it would be good to capture a good chunk of that. Qualcomm is the company that Nvidia wants to attack with this all-integrated chip.

Android is another story as there are so many different resolutions and screens, formats, and things are not so easy. Ice cream sandwich might make things a bit easier for the developers. So after January 2012, things might start to turn for the better for Android based tablets.

Google can be happy that Microsoft, HP’s now defunct Palm OS, or RIM’s Blackberry OS for Playbook are not doing particularly good job fighting Apple’s iOS for iPad.

Mike Capps says that Bulletstorm “didn’t make money,” in an article on Kotaku. Despite the fact that the game was not a financial success, the game was apparently still worth making, according to Capps. Bulletstorm reportedly struggled to crack 300,000 units in sales.

People Can Fly, the studio that Epic owns and that developed Bulletstorm, is apparently working on something else that Capps believes will be great. We, too, will be excited to see what People Can Fly is working on, as we thought Bulletstorm was a very good title that unfortunately many people just didn’t get.

We have to wonder (based on Capps’s comments) if a sequel to Bulletstorm isn’t on the Epic radar at the moment for a future release, as all of this talk seems to indicate that this is the case.

Online games such as FarmVille and World of Warcraft are being used by criminals to launder dirty money money, according to New South Wales coppers.

Apparently criminals have discovered that buying and selling virtual items is a growing new way of cleaning dirty money. NSW Police Detective Superintendent Commander Colin Dyson it was a "relatively new" trend provided an "emerging opportunity for criminals".

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, police were looking into how criminals are exploiting that Internet opportunity. Dyson said criminals were using online virtual worlds to communicate and transfer funds around the world.

So if a dwarf comes up to you and offers to flog you a dodgy hammer, or wants you to go on a bank raid which does not involve magic or a dragon you will know why.

In what might be the largest telecommunications refund, Verizon Wireless has agreed to give its users more than $90 million in refunds.

Apparently 15 million subscribers were charged for data usage or Internet access, though they weren't on data usage plans. Punters were billed for bogus data sessions between $2 and $6 each on their October and November bills.

You know that a company knows it is in deep do-do when its press release starts with the phrase “we value our customers”. Verizon Wireless Deputy General Counsel Mary Coyne said that Verizon Wireless values our customer relationships and we always want to do the right thing for our customers.

The problem was that over the past several years approximately 15 million customers who did not have data plans were billed for data sessions on their phones that they did not initiate. These customers would normally have been billed at the standard rate of $1.99 per megabyte for any data they chose to access from their phones. The majority of the data sessions involved minor data exchanges caused by software built into their phones; others involved accessing the Web, which should not have incurred charges.

Sony has started making money again thanks to a combination of increased computer sales and tellies. But the word on the street is that Sony is finally making cash from the PS3.

After years trying to flog the PS3 at outragious prices and being surprised that people bought XBoxes and the Nintendo Wii instead, Sony dropped the price to something a little more reasonable and people started to buy them.

Sony's Networked Products and Services, which are PCs and PlayStations, recorded a 32.4 percent year-on-year increase. During the quarter, 2.4 million PS3s were sold. There were 1.2 million PSPs and 1.6 PS2s sold in that same period last year. Overall revenue inched up 3.8 percent, and the company posted a US$295 million net profit.

Now if Sony had listened to what I was writing two years ago and competed with Microsoft on price rather than sitting smugly back and saying “people will buy it” it might have made it back into the black a damn sight quicker.

Sony has to be celebrating somewhere, as news has reached us that the company is no longer losing money on the PlayStation 3 hardware. This news comes after multiple console revisions over the past four years to cut the cost of the console.

Sources claim to us that Sony isn’t making much on each PlayStation 3 that they sell, but at least they are not losing major money on every console they sell. It is unknown if the company believes that it can recoup all of the money that it has lost on the console over time, but we have to admit that this is a tall order, because quite honestly, Sony has lost a lot of money.

While many have predicted the death of the PlayStation 3, some whisper to us that Sony would like to push at least a few more years out of the PS3 since it will help offset the losses that the company has experienced on the entire PlayStation 3 project. Mumblings from the shadow dwellers in the know say that Sony has learned a lot about what they plan to do with the next evolution of hardware for the PlayStation 4; and they will not be repeating the losses that they encountered with the PS3.

Most analysts seem to agree right now that it is likely that both Sony and Microsoft are targeting at least the holiday season of 2012 before they even think about the release of a new console. It is understandable that both companies have to milk as much life out of both consoles as they can.

As for Nintendo, it seems that they have little interest in the release of a high-performance console to compete with Sony and Microsoft, but some analysts consider that this might be a smoke screen and that the company is actually working on something to be released sooner.

In the meantime, both Sony and Microsoft hope that motion control technology and 3D will be enough to extend the life of the current console system.